


Comfort

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:20:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23753734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: Bond ferrets out one of Q’s secretly-favorite things.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 50
Kudos: 216





	Comfort

“‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’” Bond said. He was sitting at an outdoor cafe table in Bangkok, nursing a dark-roasted, bittersweet Thai coffee and waiting for his target to show. He had just solved the cypher Q had given him before he left: Not a hard code, but a long one, meant to give him something to do during surveillance. 

“Very good,” Q said in his ear. He sounded pleased, as he usually was when Bond did something well, but Bond could also hear a smile in his voice, which was much rarer.

“Have a thing for quotations?” he asked. 

“In a manner of speaking,” Q said. They had gotten that far at least, that Q would let him know when he was on the right track instead of attempting a more-or-less futile stonewall action. 

“Typography?” Bond asked, but then his arms-dealer mark emerged from the shady cafe down the street. “Target sighted.”

“I’ve got a visual,” Q said. 

“I’ll stay on him.” 

He was on the plane home before it occurred to him to revisit the issue. 

-

“‘Next time, pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,’” Bond said. He set his gun and radio on top of Q’s desk. 

“What?” Q asked. After a moment of blankness, his face cleared and he said, “No, it’s not pangrams. It could be pangrams—there’s an excellent case that’s been made for them—but that’s not it. Are you going to be persistent about this?” 

“We’re persistent people,” Bond said, leaving it up to Q to decide which ‘we’ he was referring to. 

To emphasize his point, and because Q’s hideous brown and orange plaid sofa was actually the most comfortable piece of furniture in the building, he stayed and read his latest paperback until Q packed up for the night. 

He felt Q’s eyes on him several times and Q left earlier than he usually did. Maybe Bond had stolen his usual spot for a nap. 

-

“Vocal recreation?” Bond wondered in between taking shots with Q’s newest ammunition. “But you’ve got more than enough audio of me, and that would involve phonemes, not letters.” He called down a new target to replace the one he’d vaporized over the last three rounds. 

“Say ‘phonemes’ again,” Q told him. “It’s the last sound-bite I need before we can replace you with the robot in the secret sub-basement.” 

“Phonemes,” Bond said. “It takes a flesh-and-blood man to appreciate bullets like this, and you like being appreciated too much to replace me.” 

“Yes, however will I deal with all of this flattery?” Q asked. He was trying to sound acerbic, but Bond could hear a smile in his voice again. 

“Do you just like people doing what you tell them to do?” Bond raised his Walther. It didn’t much matter where he hit the target, given the relatively immense material damage; he aimed for the center anyway. 

“I’ll never complain about it,” Q told him. “But no, you’re getting colder.” 

“Words, then.” Bond fired the last bullet. Cracks spiderwebbed across the target but it refused to shatter. “Something with words.” 

“I especially like words that are arranged into a report on the range testing of that ammunition,” Q hinted, but he didn’t disagree.

-

Bond coughed. It sounded wet in his throat. “Roses are red, human veins are blue,” he said before dissolving into another round of hacking. “Is…poetry…the thing that does it for you?” 

“This isn’t the appropriate forum for that discussion,” Q informed him, his voice as calm as ever. 

“I’m all…about…appropriate,” Bond wheezed. This time the coughing lasted a full half minute. “Fuck.” 

“I would have said inappropriate fucks were more your strong suit, but what do I know?” 

“Come…find out…for yourself,” Bond offered. 

Q didn’t answer; the receiver in Bond’s ear went silent. 

Hmm. Not poetry, from the sound of Q’s voice. Or at least poetry wasn’t the main thing, like pangrams weren’t the main thing. He contemplated Q’s latest puzzle as he lay on the irritatingly nouveau riche marble floor of his arms-dealing target’s mansion. The floor was tilted at a slight angle, so probably the target had offended his construction workers. This was both unsurprising and useful because he had the high ground and that meant the blood from all the corpses around him was sliding away from him instead of leaking in his direction. 

He imagined Q standing in front of his monitors, keeping his voice steady even as he and other Q Branch techs worked in frantic synchronicity to clear the path for Bond’s medical aid while obfuscating any news of the shootout that could send negative attention to the area. He knew this was happening. He did. But he couldn’t hear Q to confirm it. 

“Talk to me,” Bond said. 

Q instantly obliged. “Talk to you? About what, the knifeproof tuxedo I’ll be obligated to invent after this? I didn’t want a degree in nanofibers, but apparently I’m getting one—” 

Bond smiled as Q’s voice filled his ear, the click-clack of typing fingers relentless in the background. 

The well-oiled Six machine was on its way. He just had to last. And lasting was what he did best. 

-

Bond woke up to the sound of Q’s voice as though it had never left his ear. 

“ _Max Challenge straightened to his full six foot five inches, letting the cronies in front of him take in the barrel of his chest, the width of biceps developed from a summer of digging swimming pools down the coast, the thickness of thighs that had spent their best years marching for Uncle Sam. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Try me.’_ Christ, 007, how do you read this drivel?” 

Bond blinked his eyes open and was unsurprised to see the familiar, sterile-white surroundings of Medical. “It keeps me humble,” he said, or tried to—he ended up coughing in the middle of it, his dry throat spasming. 

Q shoved a half-full cup of ice chips into his hand. “I’ve been having some myself,” he said into the silence while Bond sucked on them. “All that reading—” He stopped, pressing his lips together, a faint flush growing across his cheeks. 

Bond snuck a glance at the book in Q’s lap, still held so that his index finger marked the page he was on. Q had made it about a third of the way through Bond’s latest thriller. “I’ll bet together we could write a better one,” he offered. “I’ll do the fight scenes and you do the research.” 

That got Q to chuckle, at least, and his shoulders dropped promisingly. “I’m no writer, 007.” 

Bond raised an eyebrow back. “You think you can’t do better than Tybee Mature?” he asked. That was the penname of whoever wrote Bond’s literary Jaffa cakes. 

Q smiled. “Not without spending far more time than I’ve got,” he said, and he stood. “Speaking of which, I should get back to work. Good to see you up and about.” He set Bond’s book on the bedside table and left rather quickly. 

Hmm. Well, Q’s mystery thing certainly wasn’t writing, wasn’t suspense novels, and (most definitively) wasn’t sharing his feelings with a drugged-up field agent. Which was fair. 

Q did seem to like Bond, though, which was comforting even though it wasn’t the answer. 

-

As soon as he could sneak out of Medical under his own power, Bond snuck _into_ Q’s Georgian townhouse in Soho. Two black cats, Bib and Lib by their collars, meowed up at him and twined around his ankles, but otherwise they didn’t impede his progress. Q really needed a dog. 

The basement had been turned into a lab space, computing equipment on one side and benches covered in engineering materials on the other. The ground floor featured a suspiciously clean-looking kitchen and a refrigerator full of take-away boxes and pre-made salads. Looking at the automated catfood and water dispensers, the cozy breakfast nook featuring a cat bed perched to catch the sunlight, the rope-covered scratching post—it seemed clear that the kitchen was the cats’ domain more than Q’s. 

The next floor up featured a large flatscreen TV with accompanying video game consoles, a comfortable-looking sofa with a cathair-covered blanket on the back of it, and a long shelf that had been converted into a tea-making station. The tea shelf looked much more frequently used than the kitchen did. Above the TV room was the bedroom and master bath, which Bond only glanced into for security’s sake. Q didn’t make his bed; Bond’s fingers itched to straighten the blankets. Maybe later. 

At the very top, he found the library. 

Dark wooden shelves crowded the walls, thick books crowded the shelves, and all of it surrounded a well-worn, thick-stuffed reclining chair. Incomprehensible maths and computing lived on one bookcase, practical engineering nearby, and popular fiction on the opposite side. Plenty of sci-fi and fantasy attested to Q’s nerdiness, and a surprising number of books on history, travel, and foreign languages told Bond that Q was interested in far more than the science and engineering of his profession. 

Seeing those shelves felt like getting to see Q’s brain on display, the folds of it spread out for Bond’s examination. 

One shelf contained nothing but audiobooks. Fucking CD collections, most of them, and even a few cassette tapes—Q was officially not allowed to give Bond shit about his vinyl. 

Bond thought back to Q, reading to him while he was unconscious. An act of care. He imagined Q, alone, and the only voices he trusted to read to him were the voices of strangers. 

He checked the audiobooks carefully. He wouldn’t pick a book that Q had already listened to; nothing good could come from competing with the likes of Tim Curry. Then he wandered over to a shelf of books that seemed to have nothing in common but how well worn they were. Books that meant something. At one end of the shelf, the Max Challenge book peeked out at him, and Bond was pretty sure that Q didn’t treasure it because of Tybee Mature’s elegant prose. That might be the easy way out—telling Q they simply had to finish reading, teasing Q while still letting Q have what he wanted. 

But Bond liked difficult. And he liked Q. So he went back down to Q’s den, draped himself attractively over the sofa, let the two cats nap behind him, and waited. 

When Q came in, he didn’t look surprised to see him. His eyes widened, however, when Bond held up the book. 

“Ah,” Q said. “You’ve figured me out.” 

“Thought I’d return the favor.” Bond patted the cushion next to him, inviting Q onto his own sofa, a fact that Q did not miss if the wry turn of his brow was any indication. Still, he sat. 

“It’s 310 pages,” Q said, shifting restlessly, looking everywhere but at him. “Just because I—you certainly don’t have to—” 

“I thought a chapter a night,” Bond interrupted. He dropped his arm round Q’s shoulders and tugged him closer, sitting them thigh to thigh. If Q had ever thought him a hopeless heterosexual, that should disabuse him. Though this wasn’t about sex—not yet. 

“Surprised you didn’t bring out the Catullus,” Q muttered, apparently thinking along the same vein. 

“Maybe later,” Bond said. Perhaps later he would push Q into his unmade bed, use his mouth and his hands and the words Q liked so much to make him come, his voice in Q’s ear the way Q’s had been in his. For now, he read. 

“‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.’” 

“You didn’t even read that like an innuendo,” Q marvelled. “Well done. I’m proud of you.” 

Bond barked a laugh. “Shall I keep going?” he asked. “Or are you going to interrupt after every sentence?” 

“No, no, I’m listening,” Q said, and he rested his head against Bond’s shoulder. 

Bond kept reading, and the tension leaked out of Q’s body until he really was using Bond as a pillow, grinning at Bond’s ‘old man’ Gandalf voice and poking him in the ribs when he realized that Bond had borrowed Q’s accent for Bilbo. 

Bond smiled. Sex was one thing, if he and Q liked. Comfort could be a harder thing to find. A more difficult thing to give. 

But Bond liked difficult. He liked Q. And if Six was a Lonely Mountain, then they deserved a comfortable little hobbit home too. 

**Author's Note:**

> Q's "excellent case" for pangrams is a pangram-focused novel called Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn. Meanwhile, Tybee Mature's Max Challenge is a parody of Lee Child's Jack Reacher character. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Constructive criticism is welcome. <3


End file.
